Hölderlin

I Have to protect themselves from their own unlimited tenderness with the aid of the foreign principle of differentiation.  

This is why, in the same letter, Hölderlin

 declares that "the athletic [character] of the southern people in the ruins of the ancient spirit made [him] more familiar with the

specific essence of the Greeks".  

What is properly Greek is the necessity of applying the athletic principle of form in order to protect one's own self from the excess of oriental fire that constitutes one's nature, whereas with the modems, it is precisely the opposite.

 

From this we can shed light on what  Hölderlin was saying in the first letter to Bohlendorff: it is also so dangerous to deduce the rules of art for oneself exclusively from Greek excellence.  

I have laboured long over this, and know by now that, with the exception of what must be the highest for the Greeks and for us - namely, the living relationship, and destiny - we must not share anything identical with them. 

Yet what is familiar must be learned as well as what is alien. 

This is why the Greeks are so indispensable for us. 

It is only that we will not follow them in our own, national [spirit] since, as I said, the free use of what is one's own is the most difficult.

We cannot simply imitate the Greeks because our art has to respond to a
nature which is diametrically opposed to theirs. 

We have to appropriate what is natural to them, sacred pathos and celestial fire, exactly as they had to appropriate what is natural to us, clarity of presentation and Junonian sobriety.  

We see from this that Holderlin is opposed to classicism, for which Greek art  is the norm for all future art.

According to him, we must be modems and not look to antiquity for our models. 

But  we have, however, something in common with the Greeks, which is neither nature nor culture, but is higher than either of them, and of which they are only abstract elements: das lebendige Verhiiltnis und Geschick, the living relation, and destiny, or the address, which imply that, like them, we have to appropriate what is foreign to us.  

This is why, despite the fact that the Greeks cannot and should not be imitated, they remain
indispensable for us.  

For we have yet to learn the use of what is proper to us, that is the clarity of presentation and Junonian sobriety that the Greeks mastered much as it was, for them, the foreign element of their
culture. 

Therefore, the Greeks cannot help us with our art, but since Greek art gives us an image of our nature, it can help us accomplish what the Greeks lacked themselves, the achievement of free use of what is proper.  

The Greeks can then help us achieve what Hölderlin, in the remarks on Sophocles, will name die vaterliindische Umkehr, the native reversal.

The originality of the Holderlinian conception of the relation between antiquity and modernity stems from the fact that, for Hölderlin , the Greek does not simply differ from the Hesperian as nature (infancy) from culture (maturity), but that both of them are in themselves divided

between nature and culture, physis and techne.

Hölderlin unlike Schiller, does not oppose the Greeks to the Modems in an external manner. 

This is why there is no question, for him, of choosing between the Greek and the Modern side, between past and future. 

The Greeks are, in a way, an inverted mirror image of ourselves, they do not represent something of a bygone past. 

For they have more opened the possibilities of life than produced works that ought to be imitated. This is why they remain an example even though it clearly appears that they cannot nor should be
imitated. 

We must, indeed, distinguish between the model and the example, between what has to be imitated in a static sense of reproduction, and what can be followed in a dynamic and inventive
way.

We can learn a lesson from the failure of the Greeks, in the sense that what caused their ruination, the obsession with form, can serve for us as an example to follow which can lead us to turn our original cultural tendency towards the unlimited in the opposite direction, and direct it
towards our earthly nature. 

We should not imitate their art and their culture, but we can nevertheless follow their example in such a way that we return to our proper nature and accede to this hyperculture which is the learning of the free use of what is proper to us.

It is thus in their failure itself that the Greeks remain an example for us modems.

See in this matter Beda Alleman, who, in her article "Holderlin between the
Ancients and the Modems" ('HOIderlin entre les Anciens et les Modernes', Cahier de Hölderlin,  1987, p.315) cit Klopstock's epigram, entitled 'The Resolution of Doubt': 

"To imitate is forbidden, and yet it names me! Your sonorous praises, always ever Greece! If the Genius in your soul is burning! 

Then imitate the Greek. The Greek invented."

Starting from this, we can try to understand the project of the later Hölderlin, the Hölderlin of the translations of Sophocles's tragedies. 

For, clearly, this enterprise is concerned with trying to understand oneself and one's age better by taking this detour through foreign lands that Hölderlin had himself actually undertaken in his journey to Bordeaux. 

For, as is noted by Wofgang Binder in his article on Hölderlin and Sophocles', there is a third way between mimetic academicism and rupture with tradition, and it is the one leading Hölderlin, as he writes to Schiller in 1801, to look to free himself from "servility to the letter of the Greek",

showing that "the great precision" of Greek authors comes from their "fullness of spirit", in other terms showing that the "aorgic" spirit of the Greeks, pushed towards the unlimited, had to give itself in its art the the strictest form in order to "be able to seize itself' - which is the problem
of the Greeks itself, as Hölderlin says in his Remarks on Antigone, whereas that of the modems is, on the contrary, in the absence of separation that characterises them, and because of their birth in a world of a convention, where everything is rigidly structured in disciplines and compartments, to "be able to reach somewhere". 

It is then a matter of both making apparent the original oriental nature of the Greeks that they

themselves have made redundant by losing themselves in what Schiller names "the far-away country of art", and of letting out those Moderns

Hölderlin names more exactly Hesperians, inhabitants of the land of dusk, from their native world of convention by opening for them the possibility of fulfilling their destiny and thus of opening themselves up to the oriental foreignness of their culture. 

For the re-channelling of the Greek to its proper coincides with the accomplishment of Hesperian culture, which implies, as Wolfgang Binder stresses, that "Hölderlin  translating Sophocles as it would have appeared if, in a favourable moment of the world, the Greeks were permitted self-accomplishment, does nothing other, when it comes to direction, than what his later poetry, that wants to be a 'native', and therefore hesperian poetry, will do".

This is what he explains to his publisher, Wilmans, in a letter of September 2th, 1803: "I hope that Greek art, which is foreign for us due to national conformism and defaults which it has been able to abide, will thus be presented more vividly (lebendiger) than is customary by my
accentuating the Oriental element it had always distanced itself from, and
by correcting its aesthetic faults Hölderlin  proposes to orientalise

Sophocles, in order to correct his artistic fault, which is that of an excess of art. 

What thus characterises Hölderlin, in relation to the classical purism for which the Greek can never be Greek enough, is his will to stress in the Greek what is non-Greek, what is oriental.

This term has to be understood as one of the extremes between which world becoming
unfolds, as can be understood from the lines in "Wie wenn am Feiertage" that say of nature that she is "older than the ages", and then, "than the Gods of Orient and Occident".35 For, as is indicated by several poems where there is a reference to the Orient, to the forests of Indus  ('The
Eagle', Germania', 'The Ister'), to the cities of the Euphrates and the rues of Palmyra ('Patmos'), to Asia and the east ('At the Source of the Danube'), der Orient, the Orient, the East, means the country of origin of the dionysiac, which is to say of ecstatic enthusiasm, as Holderlin shows
in Dichterberuf, 'The Poet's Vocation': Des Ganges Ufen horten des Freudengotts Triumph, als allerobemd vom Hindus her Der junge Bacchus kam, mit heiligen Weine vom Schlafe die Volker wekend.

The banks of Ganges heard how the god ofjoy
Was hailed when conquering all from far Indus came the youthful Bacchus, and with holy
Wine from their drowsiness woke the peoples
Oriental, then, means: more original, more free, more foreign, non classical, non-conventional, immediate, dionysiac. 

We have to note, however, that with Hölderlin  the duality is not, as with Nietzsche, that

between Dioysus and Apollo, the dioynisiac being the oriental principle of the unlimited, and the apollinian the Greek one of form and limit. 

In  The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche opposes these two principles like musical to plastic art, intoxication to dream, and shows how what differentiates the Greeks from the oriental barbarians is precisely the reconciliation of the organic and the orgiastic in tragedy, where the
chorus is the musical and orgiastic element, and the action of the characters the apollinian dream which gives form and limit in the epic element to the dionysiac vision of the chorus. Nietzsche thus defines.

Homer as the artist of dream, completely abandoning himself to the beauty of appearance and form, but sees in him "the total victory of the apollinian illusion" against Dionysos, whereas Holderlin sees the victory of Junonian sobriety over Apollo. 

For Apollo, the sun-God, is for Hölderlin not the principle of art, but in the contrary that of celestial fire.

That the Nietzschean dionysiac coincide with apollinian fire can be no doubt explained by the double nature of Apollo, at once the most Greek of Greek gods and nevertheless also of foreign origin, asiatic or nordic, at once the god of art, having the lyre as attribute, but also the God bearing the bow menacing from afar, dispersing death, and communicating the future through oracles, with the intermediary of Pythia at Delphi.

Things, however, become more complex once we take into account that, in a letter to Willmans of April 2nd, 1804, Holderlin specifies: I believe I have written throughout against excentric enthusiasm and have thus attained Greek simplicity; I also hope to remain faithful to this principle - if I may express more boldly what is forbidden to the poet - against excentric enthusiasm.

Is not excentric enthusiasm the opposite of sobriety, the tendency to be borne towards the divine unlimited, the native and thus oriental element of the Greek? There seems to be a blatant contradiction: how can Hölderlin at once orientalise Greek tragedy, that is to say draw out the
unlimited element in it, and write against it, against excentric enthusiasm?

According to Beisner, who is here followed by both Beda Alleman and Wolfgang Binder, the entire problem has its root in the word gegen, which, in German, can have the sense of both "against" and "towards" or "turning to" (which, parenthetically, makes more of an enigma of the famous Nietzschean affirmation at the end of Ecce Homo:
"Hat man mich verstanden? Dionysos gegen den Gekreuzigten ...).

If  we interpret it in its second sense, the Hesperian poet follows his cultural tendency which
is celestial fire, and thus attains Greek simplicity, which is nothing other than the ecstatic natural of the Greeks, their native opening to celestial fire. 

If we keep the oppositional sense of "against", we then have to assume that the orientalisation concerns only Antigone, which is the tragedy where the famous native reversal is produced, which is to say the tendency to return to the proper, the oriental element, whereas with Oedipus it is the cultural tendency that is strongest It would then be"Have I been understood? Dionysus against the crucified",

Frangoise Dastur speaking solely of Oedipus that Holderlin could have written against
excentric enthusiasm, by translating it to achieve his own Hesperian return to the native. 

At least this is the interpretation given by Beda Alleman in her book on Hölderlin and Heidegger.

Without being able to undertake, at this moment, an examination of these "corrections" that Hölderlin proposes to bring to Sophocles's text, it remains to conclude on this project of "orientalising" translation. 

For we are dealing, as Binder notes, with a triple project: that of the transcription

of one language into another, of Greek into German; but also of the transposition of the original into a state of accomplishment it has missed by drawing out the oriental under the Greek; finally, an accomplishment of the Hesperian itself, since the oriental constitutes its cultural tendency.

For Hölderlin this means neither transposing the Greek into German, which would no longer be Greek, nor carbon-copying the German from the Greek, which would still be Greek, but unreadable to us. Rather, it means correcting the excess of art which lead Greece to its downfall by making its oriental nature appear, which is to say, in the end, translating the Greek into Greek

by letting it pass into another language and thus accomplishing what it could not bring itself to good end. 

What reveals itself in such a trans-lation is, as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe stresses, that
"Greece, as such, Greece itself,  does not exist,,:39 it is torn, doubled, not sutured into a monolithic, stable essence, which should be said of any people. 

What we know of it, Junonian sobriety, Homeric clarity, the athleticism of form, is a
received opinion destined to suppress the elemental force of the native Greek tendency to transgress  this oriental  principle of celestial fire that prevents Greece from coinciding with itself, and it is thus, paradoxically, this impropriety that constitutes precisely this "proper" which is for the Modems to learn, as always, in foreign lands.